Using Green Screen to explore animal habitats

My Little Learners are learning all about wild animals and the habitats they live in. Today we created a portal into the African plains to see what the landscape is like where these animals live. We were able to look at the vegetation, weather and ground to give us an understanding of how different it is to where we live. To bring this to life, we used Green Screen technology. Take a look below!

Here’s how we did it: 

1. Set up a tripod or clamp to hold your iPad. 
2. Use the Video setting on Camera.
3. Children place a ball of green play dough on the table and take time to spread it and flatten it out. They stopped recording when they were happy with their area.
4. Next the children searched for a photograph they would like to use to explore their scene. We looked on unsplash.com for pictures. I was able to take that opportunity to teach them how to save a photo to Photos using their iPad too.
5. Next they jumped over to iMovie and inserted their photo onto the timeline (be sure to stretch this photo out for the length of time you want the green screen to run for).
6. After this, they went into the media library on iMovie and found the recording of their green play dough. When you tap on that, three wee dots will appear. When you press on those, you have lots of different options, one of which is Green / Blue Screen. 
7. Their final step was to then tap on the green play dough to indicate to iMovie that this is the colour you want to remove. 
8. Play around with the original photo - they found that zooming in on some of photos helped, while keeping other zoomed out gave them a better view of the scene. 
9. When complete, you can add a soundtrack, titles and effects as required.
10. Export your movie and share it with others.

I did this activity today with 5 and 6 year olds. Obviously with this age group they benefitted from teacher support, but with older pupils you could demonstrate this and then give them the freedom to work on it fully independently. 

We had so many great discussions about the habitats they ‘found’ in their portal and it will be used to scaffold their imagination later when we write and talk about the habitats of these animals throughout this topic.